Denigrating the Venerated

It looks like I am not the only blogger willing to risk the backlash of an angry mob by going against custom and speaking ill of the dead. The subject of today’s tirade is the recently departed Margaret Thatcher, who is certainly a much more prominent target for scorn than the lowly Tea Party fundamentalist I took aim at just the other day,

The individual invoking the same type of vituperative invective against Thatcher as I did to Mark Krebs is none other than George Galloway, a long-time politico and current member of the British parliament. A brief pause is in order to allow for a standing ovation for Mr. Galloway!

The tendency to gloss over even the most blatant public vulgarities of our dead on the event of their demise is highly over-rated and counter productive to society. It also gives a warm and fuzzy feeling to the living monsters among us that their legacy (of torture and death) won’t become the highlight reel for their remaining kin and countrymen. Screw that.

Here are a few tasty bits on Thatcher from Mr. Galloway. The whole post is here at this link.

On one of my first political demonstrations – against the Conservative government of Edward Heath (1970-74) the slogan of the day was “Margaret Thatcher- Milk snatcher”. It was the first but not the last time I spat out her name in distaste.

She destroyed more than a third of Britain’s manufacturing capacity, significantly more than Hitler’s Luftwaffe ever achieved.

In the infamous sermon on the Mound in Edinburgh addressing the Church of Scotland she opined that there was “no such thing as society”…”only individuals”

Enjoy

A Eulogy over Tea

If you find it morbidly inappropriate to speak ill of the dead, click away now. If you’d have enjoyed getting the chance to drag the remains of Hitler’s smoldering corpse though the streets like the Italians did with Mussolini, please proceed.

I find it morally reprehensible to gloss over the damages done by morally reprehensible people who publicly propagate the most vile sorts of ideas into the public domain. I am moved to displays of public outrage like this blogpost when the people doing the damage claim to be working under direct contract with God.. Expect a much more scathing eulogy on the occasion of the deaths of all those monsters who promulgated legal torture and shamed us as a nation.
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I have been receiving a lot of questions regarding the whereabouts of Mark Francis Krebs. His prolific trolling on Facebook feeds (mine and others) suddenly went silent and it left many people wondering what happened to him.

Facebook might know more about you than the NSA, FBI and CIA combined, but one thing they haven’t yet mastered is the concept of death. In real life people actually die all the time, but on Facebook your electronic soul can exist in an amorphous cloud of bits, ready to be called upon to hawk any brand or any cause you intentionally (or accidentally) clicked a “like” button when your finger still had a pulse.

Such is the case for Mark Francis Krebs, dead at age 52 of bloat and self-neglect (see pic). Sad, lonely figure of a man, laying dead in his Texas apartment for ten days, rotting away unnoticed in his Lazy Boy until the stretch of his decay invaded the physical space of his neighbors invoking calls to the authorities.

Mark was an underachieving underclassman from high school that I ‘reconnected’ with thru Facebook awhile back. His academic acumen was so sub par it left him wide open for a life addicted to Fox News propaganda and Pentacostal wing-nuts alike, which resulted in his stalwart support of the kind of idiotic thinking that favors “rapist’s rights” over the dignity of our wives, mothers and daughters. Krebs was a shadow member of “Zygotes over People”, and a persistent right wing troll on my Facebook feed. If he were alive today Krebs would be pimping shotguns for babies as a solution to gun violence. He was the sad, bloated, living stereotype of every Tea Party lunatic, NRA slobbering gun nut and Jeebus freak you ever encountered, all rolled into one apparently corpulent soul.

I did my best to try and council the crazy out of him but given the limitations on what can be accomplished through Facebook, I was unable to move Mark from the extreme rightwing category on religion or politics.

All surviving family should be joyously consoled with my testimony that he went to his grave fully believing every bit of religious tripe ever fed to him, so he should be safe in the arms of imaginary Jeebus by now and insulated from my necessarily savage review of our online relationship

Mark was my most dedicated Fundamentalist Facebook troll. I figured he must have been getting paid a few pennies per post from Rove’s 350 million dollar wingnut welfare machine just based on the amount and intensity of his efforts, but that’s just a guess.

Though his extremism and Christian delusion knew no bounds, I never thought to block or unfriend him. My theory is that the best defense against people that far off the map of common public sense and decency Is to make sure they are seen. The more people see of these types of lunatics, the better off for the rest of us. Sunshine, disinfectant,

Enjoy.

The Heretics Hayride

Here’s a spring gift that I hope my aging tech, geek, atheist, skeptic, and nimble-minded Euro-youth niches will all appreciate.  I’m pretty sure I’ll offend, applaud or confuse quite a few other niches along the way.  As always, join at your own risk. I don’t want to read or watch whiny Youtube videos about a bunch of hurt feelings when everybody laughs at you for falling off the back of the skeptic’s hay wagon.

If there isn’t enough hay to begin with, there’s a good chance I might be able to stir up a little extra along the way.  Hold the horses!! Heretic HQ just called to tell me that if there are no rules of conduct, then the ride cannot be certified by the head of the Atheistplus Action committee, the formerly estimable Dr. Richard Carrier (aka Debbie Downer).  Since this blog insists on inclusiveness and I have been accused of being something a tad south of totally gracious, here goes:

The Heretic Hayride rules of conduct are as follows:

Leave your pets at home (no #carrierpigeon allowed).  Be aware that our path crosses the known territory of a doughy looking, blue-haired Siren, as well as a cinnamon skinned fuzzy-haired monster.  DO NOT attempt to approach either one. The latter is known to have hair trigger rage issues and an incredibly acute sense of hearing. Snap a PIC, Tweet to World, Call security, write blogpost, but DON’T be foolish enough to confront either of them directly if we have the misfortune of making their encounter.  Keep your arms inside the wagon at all times and avoid loose or dangling jewelry.  Dongle type earrings are known to be specially prone to snagging.

Having to construct and conform to arbitrary rules of conduct took all the fun out of the adventure, so the ride has been officially cancelled for today.

Enjoy.

Wall Street Versus the Euro

Wanna know why Wall Street is so keen on killing the Euro?

You can’t sell below cost in the Eurozone countries just to run your competition our of business, even if you have a billion dollars to give it a go.  Helps to level the playing field.  Gives the small guys half a chance to compete with the bigger players.

From this.

Enjoy.

PZ and his Pusillanimous Pixies

As the most prominent atheist comedian on the planet,I give thanks to the many godless blessings that PZ Myers and his not-so-merry band of Girlyban Skepdinks have provided me. A virtual cornucopia of idiocracy to choose from. The only other comedic assignment with more low hanging fruit than I’ve been provided would have been writing jokes for Bill Mahr during the Bush administration. I could have never have imagined (We all knew!) it would still be going strong at this late stage of the game.

But I don’t make the news, I just report it. PZenu and the pusillanimous pixies of Feminology are holed up over at Pharyngula, which to those unfamiliar with Feminology, is the Internet equivalent of the safe haven carved out by Scientologists in Clearwater FL. Like their cohorts in nonsense, the Feminologists were quick to invent their own rules and jargon. Being blocked and banned as a suppressive person was their initial mimicry. Here we are a couple years on, and now they’ve got an automated process for blocking content off their computers that’s even slicker than the blocking software the Scientologists make their people use to protect them from vicious (truthful) Internet content!)

I swear on the imaginary soul of my long departed mother that I am only adding the tiniest bit of hyperbole as I recount these cult-like similarities, and we haven’t even touched on the Feminologist-specific jargon issue yet! Suffice to,say that those idiots over at Pharyngula HQ are so Out Tech on proper skepticism that rehabilitation seems out of the question. The girls over at the PeezOrg have spent way too much time hooked up to their she-meters. There is always a little hope for their recovery but that’s assuming you could wrestle them away from their firm grasp of PZenu’s balls in the first place (Please no photoshops! (I see it already!)) I run a clean ship over here.

This will probably break the heart and soul of those like Michael Nugent (pity the poor dumb bastard) who favor a policy of NOM (non overlapping menseshysteria) between skepticism and the outright bat shit insanity that appears in faithless femininity, but I see no place for allowing evidence free claims to invade and dilute organizational attention away from the mission of figuratively (trigger warning) bitch slapping creationists and Jeebus slobberers who employ the same techniques (tactics).

One final little dingle dongle to make note of. A sad reminder that the virulent nature of memes (both good and bad-thank you Richard Dawkins) goes on unabated, and can laterally transfer from one group of pusillanimous pixies to another. In the latest example it caused a death (of Adria Richard’s career) and she wasn’t even a part of the skeptic movement! It’s not “something in the water” at conferences or a germ picked up off an unsanitary toilet seat at the buffet restaurant loo (unless that’s where Adria happened to be sitting when she got infected reading the Rebecca Watson Slate article e.g.). There is protection available for those who need it. Simply following this blog or my Twitter feed is a good first step.

Hat Tip to the many positive women of skepticism. Their inspiration and support instills a tingling sense of wonder in the nether regions near my dangling tender jiggly bits. I would name them but I’d sound like Brigham Young reading off a list of his many wives and besides, I’d never kiss and tell.

Enjoy.